It's Going to be a Rylon Night

Consciousness ate slowly through Coriolanus' sleepy gray
haze. He could feel no daylight through his eyelids, which was
odd. It was only the vernal eclipse when he'd dozed off, and
that only happened in midday. He must have slept more than 23
hours!

If so, he felt unusually weak for having taken such a long
nap. Despite his body's groaning protest, he unstuck his eyes
and looked at the night.

It was still dusk, yet . . . now, that was
strange. Huge, striped Rylon, whose first crescent was beginning to show,
had changed its place in the sky; it wasn't supposed to do that. This
meant that someone had moved him, without waking him up, to a far distant
geographic location on the World. He scanned the horizon; yes, this
clearing was definitely not where he had gone to sleep.

That got him to his feet instantly, his ultralight hardened-leather
plate body armor not hindering him in the slightest. Someone had taken
him away from his home in Norland! He searched the foliage surrounding
the clearing frantically for any recognizable signs but found none. Even
the plants in this area were different from Norland's. What cruel trick
was being played?

The faintest hint of orange Luminos' passage lingered on the
west horizon; Rylon had moved perpendicular to the ecliptic, to
the north. Well, at least he was in the same time zone. But
Rylon had shifted its position by more than its entire diameter,
which filled nearly three-and-a-quarter hours in the sky. He
must have been moved south by . . . over five hundred kay-ems?
No one could ride him that fast in twenty-three hours, no matter
what kind of horses they used.

Odd . . . both Alpha and Beta showed their tiny faces; they
hadn't been near that point in their cycle when he fell asleep.
Beta, the inner and smaller moon, superimposed its crimson,
volcanic crescent over Rylon's dark side. Alpha, the large,
gray-white outer moon, was at the far point in its orbit, just
skimming Rylon's darkened upper edge. In fact, from what he could
see of Rylon's emerging crescent, the bands of its own color were
subtly altered as well. The yellow-browns of the Center Stripe
were too well mixed with the whites around it. He hadn't seen it
like this since —

No, he'd never seen it like this, but in his early youth
he'd seen the stripes mixed even less than when he fell asleep.
For the airy swirls of Rylon's surface to have integrated that
much farther would take years. That could only mean one
thing. . . .

A horror seized him so hard he couldn't shake it free.
Hopefully, he seached for Rylon's feeble ring, which was supposed
to be invisible for the next ten years; but its white trail
became plain as soon as he looked for it. "I've been thrust into
the future!" he wailed.

He dropped to his knees and smashed his fists against the
packed earth. 'First they took me from my home, now they took me
from my time,' he thought. 'I've been kidnapped from both.
Magic must be responsible for this!'

He got up and glanced around, futilely looking for any hint
of whoever might have distorted his time frame. Sighing, he
dropped his shoulders. Anyone sly enough to cast spells on him
wasn't going to stick around unless he or she wanted to be seen.
A trained instinct told him it wasn't safe to stand out in the
open like this, so he picked up his shield, made sure his
falchion and scabbard were still there, and lightfooted off into
the surrounding forest.

The forest was dense and dark; it would almost completely
obscure his vision until midnight, when Rylon would be full. He
forged onward through the brush — though carefully, since the
terrain was unfamiliar and he'd learned to keep quiet while on
the move. Rylon's crescent was his only reference point, his
only guiding beacon; it was Rylon that told him he was headed
north.

He continued for what must have been half an hour before he
spotted trouble. In a small clearing just ahead, three large,
grayish humanoids, each toting a longbow, sat around a campfire.
They were Outer Worlders, denizens of the other side of the
World, the side facing away from Rylon. Perhaps they were
responsible for bringing him here.

No, they hadn't even noticed him — but if they did, he was
sure they'd start twanging arrows at him. They were Outer
Worlders, from "the land of the dead and the un-dead." He had to
finish them all off. He drew his falchion into his left hand.
Soundlessly, hidden by trees, he crept up on the group until he
was less than a meter behind one of them, and then his gold-
tinted blade flashed between the base of the skull and the
shoulders.

The head toppled neatly to the dusty floor, blood spurting
from the severed neck arteries. The other two instantly began
wailing in some language he didn't know, and jumped up, trying to
ready their bows.

But he was faster than both of them. He dashed over to the
one on the left and strafed his falchion across its chest. That
blow incapacitated it, to say the least. The other, now quite
frightened, loosed his arrow while starting to flee. Coriolanus
calmly interposed his shield between himself and the projectile,
curving the shield just enough for the arrow to deflect off of it
rather than stick to it. It didn't matter much whether he
stopped the arrow or not; his armor would probably have caught it
anyway.

He ran after the tall gray man, mercilessness in his eyes.
Catching up with him was no problem; though the other was
probably more familiar with the terrain, Coriolanus was far
nimbler. The gray turned and gasped as Coriolanus caught up, and
in so doing ran into a tree and doubled over. Now Cory had the
beast. He straddled him and raised his falchion.

The large man cowered in terror. With only a bow, he'd been
essentially unarmed since he started running; and now he was
helpless.

Coriolanus looked down at him, sneered, and cut his throat.

"Performer!" came a shout from the surrounding shrubbery.
Then, other voices began shouting various words of praise.
Stunned, Coriolanus assumed a full defensive stance, expecting
more sickly Outer Worlders to charge him.

The man who emerged holding one hand triumphantly high was
definitely an Inner Worlder. He wore a loose-fitting blouse and
light blue pants. Coriolanus gasped; this was the traditional
outfit worn by wizards, by those awful users of magic. That
wasn't any better than those Outer Worlders. This wizard was
probably going to blast him apart; or kill himself in the
process. But his words — why had he said "Performer" in
Coriolanus' own language? Surely, this place must be south of
Norland!

Two others followed the first out of the bushes. Their
lightly tanned skin and clothing that was indigenous to his
homeland were a welcome relief; something he finally recognized.
One was a dwarf: bearded, barely 120 cee-ems high, wearing metal
plate armor and carrying a battle axe. The other was a woman
who, except for a sheathed two-handed sword, looked and dressed
almost exactly like Coriolanus, right down to the superlight
rigid leather armor.

"Exceptional!" said the wizard-like man. His voice seemed
younger than Coriolanus had expected. "I haven't seen a
performance like that since the last fair came to Norland; and
you did it on the moment!"

"I'm called Resolve," the wizard began, but stopped when he
realized how futile it was to talk to Coriolanus at that moment.

"What's your name," he asked the woman.

She smiled. It wasn't the shy type of smile that young, protected women
gave; hers shone with command. "The name's Fhef. And Resolve's
right, you've got one impressive fighting style."

"Fhef," he rolled the name over aloud. "That's got a pretty
sound to it . . . Fhef. I like it."

She could see what he was getting at; he was practically gawking. "Cory
isn't so bad, either, fast guy," she said, and patted his shoulder. "But
there're more important things to be done first."

"Oh?" he said sarcastically. "Have you all been transported here from out
of the past?"

"Yes, we have," Resolve said.

That was enough to shock Coriolanus back to seriousness.
"You wouldn't happen to have found the magic-using lichens who
brought us here, would you?"

"No. I'm not even sure any human force did this."

"Rylon!" shouted the dwarf, who until then had remained
eerily silent. "It was Rylon's will that commanded us into the
Inner World's future!"

Coriolanus closed his eyes in acquiescence, recognizing the
dwarf's stream of bilge instantly. That sounded exactly like
what a Rylon cultist would be saying right now; he was in the
company of a fanatic.

She puzzled. What was so alien about magic? "Well, that
falchion of yours is enchanted, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but —"

"And so's your rigid leatherplate armor and my rigid
leatherplate armor and Sonna's battle axe and my two handed
sword." She unsheathed her sword to show him. "See? Magic's
just a symbol of the high class. Why is that —"

Cory silenced her. Beyond them, Resolve was pointing ahead
into a dirt bowl more than twenty meters across. At the center
of the depression, dimly lit by Rylon's waxing crescent, a row of
rigid grey plates lay partly exposed. Despite the ages of wear
it had suffered, the structure doubtlessly looked like metal.

"There it is," announced Resolve.

"What is that thing?" Cory wondered.

"Some kind of vehicle," Resolve figured, "Though not any type that anyone would
be familiar with."

Coriolanus inspected the crater. "Did you dig this?"

"No," Fhef assured him, "We found it with almost as much of
the — er, vehicle exposed as there is now."

"Well then, Resolve," Cory inquired, "Who dug it up?"

"Don't know; though I'm guessing it's whoever or whatever
brought us here. It may have been excavated by magic, but I
can't tell. Most of the time it's impossible to distinguish
between magical effects and 'physical' ones since That Power
Which Fuels Life and Death is so much a part of everything."

Coriolanus stopped dead, but not for so long as to be
noticed; Resolve's last concept had sent about three different
unpleasant emotions down his spine and into his solar plexus.
The use of magic was often called, "Wielding That Power Which
Fuels Life and Death." It had always puzzled Coriolanus why That
Power Which Fuels Life and That Power Which Fuels Death were
grouped together; maybe that was part of the reason why he
disliked magic so badly.

They entered the ditch and spread themselves across one side
of the worn shrine in the center, Resolve standing next to
Coriolanus. "It might help you to understand," the mage said,
"If you could see the craft."

He put his hands together in front of his forehead, closed
his eyes, and began murmuring. Cory strained to hear the
syllables; they sounded like complex versions of the magic
"words" he was familiar with. Resolve relaxed his face and
slowly drew his hands apart. The space between his palms was a
shade of gray brighter than the surrounding darkness. The
grayish glow grew out from his hands until it encompassed him,
then Cory, then Sonna and Fhef, and finally the metal construct
itself.

Relolve snapped his arms full apart to either side, opened
his eyes wide, and gave a loud shout. The gray area burst into
dazzling blue-white; he'd lit up the scene nearly as bright as
Luminos.

Coriolanus was both revolted and awed, but settled into
acceptance when he felt sure the light was harmless. "The metal
this structure is made of," Resolve began, "Is some form of iron;
the lodestone test proved that. However, it's tougher and harder
than any iron I can think of, even steel."

"Oh yeah?" Cory announced, coming right up next to it,
falchion in hand. "Nothing's so tough it can't be cut through!"

Fhef shouted, "Cory, no!" as Coriolanus brought his falchion
down on one of the metal plates. There was a dull thwack, and
the gold-hued sword vibrated in his hand.

"I tried that already with my two-handed sword," Fhef finished.

"Didn't even scratch it," Cory droned in amazement.

Resolve broke in. "That's the least of what we've discovered." He
stood on top of it and pulled on one of the plates. This one was
hinged. "The entrance to this thing happens to be one of the few parts
sticking out above the ground. From inside, this thing is tremendous; it
extends for about twenty meters ahead and over fifty behind — we haven't
even explored all the levels yet!"

"You mean this thing is more than one floor deep?"

"Three floors extending down for about ten meters, to be
exact. But it's not the size of this artifact that's important
so much as what's inside it. Look at this."

He reached inside and pulled out a small box that had been moved to an inner
ledge. One face held a dial much like a clock. "A timepiece,
right?" Resolve asked rhetorically. "Then why does the dial only measure
24 hours? All the clocks in the World have gone up to the full length of
a day — 96 hours — since as far back as history's been recorded."

"Well," suggested Coriolanus, "It's only 24 hours from Luminoset to full Rylon,
and 24 hours again from there to dawn. You can pretty much tell which
cycle you're in if you look outside."

"But only if you're on the World."

"Wha . . . what?"

"I found this plaque, too . . ." As he bent down to
retrieve it, the dwarf Sonna stepped up to the hole and climbed
down past him. Coriolanus giggled slightly; dwarves were so
insecure for lack of height that they always had to prove
themselves, both in muscularity and in "courage."

Resolve returned with a metal plate that had oddly square
black letters etched in it. "Can you read this?"

"Not very well."

"It's a very old version of our vernacular. Apparently, it
says, 'Earth space ship 45356.' I'm not sure what a space ship
is, but I'm guessing it's a ship for travelling through space."

"You mean through the void between the planets?"

"Yes — or between the stars."

This muffed Coriolanus. "Don't tell me you subscribe to the
theory that the stars are distant Luminoses!"

"Why not? It would explain a lot of things. Anyhow, I got
a look at what was in the far end, and as far as I can guess,
it's a huge, complex version of the same thing you have at the
end of a sky rocket.

Coriolanus smiled; he was getting a brilliant idea. "Could
this have been made by the Primordial Beings?" Oh, now he was on
to something. The godlike race that sprang from the loins of the
World those eons ago, the ones destroyed by their own dark magic,
they went to other planets, to Rylon, maybe to Luminos. Yes.
Maybe they weren't all dead, maybe a few still held their
immortality, and maybe one of them had brought him and these
others here from out of the past.

"I don't think the Primordial Beings ever existed," Resolve
interrupted his train of thought. "Not in the godlike way we
think of them, anyway."

At first, Cory's heart sank, but then the radical nature of
that statement surfaced as a shock.

"Gods don't need space ships," Resolve continued. "They
don't need thrust machines, or armored walls, or clocks. No gods
captained this vessel, only men." He noticed Cory's shock and
confusion going deeper. "Haven't you ever noticed how things
don't quite seem to fit? How humans and their cousins are the
only animals capable of defending themselves? How Rylon as a
light in the dark seems out of place? How Luminos seems too red
or orange, how the 40-day year seems twice too short — how the
96-hour day seems four times too long?"

Now Cory could begin to see what he was getting at. The
twenty-four hour clock. Sure, the days seemed four times too
long, but wouldn't that cause people to experiment with 24-hour
timekeeping cycles?

"I dated the ship," the wizard declared. "It's possible to
date things by reading their magic traces, you know."

Cory smirked unpleasantly. Yes, he knew that.

"It's about thirty thousand years old. A few papers are
preserved in unmovable transparent chambers in the front. A lot
of their dates seem to indicate a year that's over 360 of their
days long — about twice the length of our 40-day year. One of
them makes a reference to something called, 'Terraforming,' and
from what I could pick up the word means changing a planet to
support life."

Cory knew, subconsciously, what Resolve had just implied, but he couldn't
accept it without being sure. "Just . . . what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that life on the World hasn't been around for
more than thirty thousand years! The people who crewed this
space ship, and maybe other vehicles like it, were our
forerunners. No race of gods sprang from the loins of the world,
regular people came here from some other place. Dark magic
caused the downfall of primordial civilization — sure. There's
more than enough evidence to support that. But it was ordinary
humans, like you or I, that infected the world with their dark magic."

"Dark magic, no!" Cory burst out. "All magic's what killed
the World. Look at you, you're perpetuating that decadent trend right
now! Casting a spell to pollute the air with light. Dark magic and
bright magic are both deadly; don't try denying it!"

Coriolanus tromped off into a nearby catch of trees before
Resolve had a chance to reply. "Cory," Fhef inquired, beginning
to follow him.

'Sure he does,' Fhef thought, waited for Resolve to turn his
attention elsewhere, and then followed Cory's trail into the
forest.

She found him seated on a boulder, fiddling with a twig and
staring up at Rylon. She sat down beside him.

"Huh?" he started. "Oh, hi Fhef. I meant what I said back
there, about magic being bad. Magic kills."

She put her arm around his shoulder. "And so does a two-
handed sword or a falchion, Cory. We knew we were taking death
into our hands the moment we strapped our scabbards to our
bodies."

Cory took out his curved, gold-hued falchion to illustrate. "Sure, and
these are magic weapons, too." He swished the blade through the air a
couple of times. "This is a great old blade, took a long time to
construct and enchant. My father gave this to me, and his father passed
it on before him."

"Heirloom, huh? I'm surprised you use it as your main weapon."

"Well, it's not that kind of heirloom. My father was a
thief, pure and simple. He wanted me to be a robber just like
him. Can you imagine that: me, taking up a career as a burglar!"

"What did you want to be, then?"

"A fighter. A full-blown front-line warrior, the type the
high classes hire out. I would have been a thief, too, if not
for . . ." he drifted off.

"If not for what, Cory?"

". . . Greslan. I met him at age ten; that's when he
gave me this armor. I'm surprised it still fits."

"It's magic, remember?"

He ignored that. "Greslan was an old wizard, going on a
hundred at the time. He got me to look at myself and be what I
really wanted. I wanted to be a fighter, so he helped train me
to be a fighter."

"A wizard taught you how to fight?"

He sheathed his falchion. "Sure, he wasn't all spells and
philosophy; he had some skill with weapons and armor, too. He
taught me to parry, to search for weak spots, to wriggle around
effectively when I was wearing armor, everything. I even picked
up how to read magic writing from him. Of course, my father was
still teaching me how to move stealthily, attack from behind,
lose myself in the shadows, and all that. It was a real
experience integrating those two trainings together."

"This Greslan sounds like a nice guy, and he was a magic person, too."

Coriolanus' features hardened. "Yeah, and magic was what killed him."

"How did that happen?" She could see him starting to
breathe heavily. He was working against something.

"I was . . . I was 34, barely an adult." He was speaking more
rapidly now. "He was working on some spell; I never learned what it was
supposed to do, but it was a powerful one. He . . . didn't do
something right, had a bad energy balance or something, and all the power was
channeled straight into him. He couldn't take the strain — if he
was younger, he might have survived, but not at 120. The idiot killed
himself with his own magic spell! . . . He was my best friend."

Fhef looked up at Rylon with him in momentary sympathy.
There was a tiny blue flash against Rylon's dark side; that was a
lightning storm on the giant planet itself. It wasn't unusual to
see storms the size of the World on the night face.

She turned to him: "Sounds like he didn't have much life
left anyway. He probably had to use bright magic just to stay
alive until one-twenty."

"Yeah, I already thought of that. But even with his good
intentions, his bright magic still took his life."

"Maybe the fatal spell was dark magic."

"Greslan use dark magic? Never. He . . ."
His voice trailed off as he searched his memory. "Oh, Rylon, I don't know
what to believe right now!"

He turned to face her, and found her face very close. She
moved in and kissed him passionately.

He broke off considerably brighter. "Well, that didn't
take you long."

"At the rate things are moving now," Fhef told him, "We might not live
to see the light of Luminos again. Say, where in Norland are you from?"

"West Riverfork, at the apex of the delta."

"You're fooling! I live less than three kay-ems northeast of there."

"Really? Then how come it took so long for me to find you?"

"Maybe you just never looked." She reached over to her side
and yanked a release catch on her armor. The suit popped open,
and she removed and discarded it.

Coriolanus was quick to follow her example. Soon, both were
lying horizontally, embracing each other with all of their
clothing under them for blankets and their armor to their backs.

There was no armor between them that Rylon night.

When Coriolanus woke up attached to Fhef, Rylon was nearly half full.
He withdrew and stood up, using his skills to avoid waking her. He put on
his underclothes, his boots, his armor, and his falchion, and strapped his
dagger-and-scabbard to his right boot ("Always have backup arms," his father
had told him). Picking up his shield, he walked out to join Resolve and
face Sonna.

Resolve greeted him as he re-entered the dig. "I can tell by
that expression you two had a good time."

Cory noticed countless exotic pieces of paraphernalia littering the
ground; they looked like some of the other things Resolve had taken out of the
vehicle. "And I see you've been indulging yourself as well."

Resolve walked over to him. Sonna followed, clutching
something long and rolled-up in his right hand. Resolve said,
"When Sonna went into the space ship, he looked in one corner and
found this."

Sonna stepped up to him and handed him the rolled-up sheet.
"Rylon be praised! This is a scribed spell."

Coriolanus snatched it up and unrolled it, focusing his
attention on what was on the page. Symbols and syllables swam by
his eyes in a sea of background empathy. Greslan had told him
that the syllables weren't nearly as important as the feeling of
what went into the writing.

"Electricity," Cory said at last. "A ram, a sphere — and a
lot of energy."

Cory looked up, bringing himself back out of the spell's
world. This was the first time he'd seen any hint of astonishment
cross Resolve's face.

"You can read evocations?" the wizard asked.

"Sure. Greslan taught me, though sometimes I wish he hadn't."

"Who's Greslan?"

Coriolanus paused. "An old friend."

"No matter. Keep the scroll, you might need it."

Cory practically dropped it. "I don't want to carry some
old magic work around with me! I'd surely never invoke that much
self-destruction."

Resolve exhaled. "Keep it. We have work ahead of us."

"What kind of work?"

"It wasn't some gods who abused dark magic and lost their
immortality, right? It was human beings, like us, and they lost
their civilization. That means that whenever a civilization gets
going, dark magic can ruin it and sour all life for millenia.
About where are we now as far as civilization development goes?"

"'Scapes me. I guess we're . . . pretty far along."

"We have moral codes and etiquette, we build with concrete, and we work
iron and high-class steel. We can light up the dark in any color of the
rainbow. In other terms, we've just started to dig our way out of the
hole our ancestors put us in thirty-some thousand years ago. Even
'civilization' was nearly meaningless only five hundred years hence.

"Civilization is blooming, and with it, dark magic. Even
back in the Norland we came from, some witchlocks were beginning
serious study into the science of dark magic manipulation. I
estimated that it would take about twenty years for dark magic to
get its opportunity to take over; and that's about how far in the
future we are right now."

Cory swallowed hard. "Then all of history's desolation could
return again, because of magic."

"Yes; by itself, dark magic just stagnates where it is and
doesn't wreak much destruction. But with someone controling it —
someone to be its vehicle or tool — dark magic thrives. Anyway,
the dark magic source is less than four kay-ems from this very
spot."

"Oh, no."

Resolve pondered this a bit further. "Hmm . . . seems
the thing that brought us here wants us to stop whoever dark magic's catalyst
is, what with putting us not four kay-ems away. Who or what could have
that much foresight?"

"Rylon could!" the dwarf bleated.

Resolve cringed his eyes for the fourth time in as many
hours. To Cory, though, this blatant fanaticism set his mind in
motion. "Magic, in a way, is mind. It is all minds, and it is
its own mind."

"I'd never heard that quote before," Resolve admitted.

"It's something Greslan taught me before he . . . .
Anyhow, could magic itself bring us here? I mean, does somebody have to
control it?"

Resolve gasped in slow motion and clutched his forehead. "I've
been a fool! Why didn't that surface to me? Of course magic could
bring us all back here on its own! People disappearing from the face of
the World have been reported before; magic could have just been pulling them to
where they were needed! In this instance, it saw the potential
catastrophe and, being independent of time, took the tools it needed from out
of the past and set them in a situation where they could work."

"And we're the tools," Cory deduced.

"Right," Fhef said, marching onto the scene with her sword drawn.
She sidled up next to Coriolanus. "You didn't think you could get by
without waking me, did you? I'm a warrior too."

Cory smirked at her and turned back to Resolve. "Did those things
you brought out from the space ship tell you anything?"

"About our past, yes; about our current situation, no. Let's get
going. We have to cross four kay-ems in less than six hours."

Sonna shouldered his battle axe and nibbled on something out
of his left hand. Cory revulsed; it looked like he was eating a
freshly-killed forest animal. That seemed like something the
dwarf might do. He reached into his own belt pouch, pulled out a
handful of dried semi-edibles, looked back up at the armor-clad
dwarf, and pocketed his food again. He wouldn't be able to eat
for a while.

Fhef sheathed her sword and caught sight of the scroll that
Cory'd tucked inside his falchion strap. "What's that," she
asked, pointing it out.

Cory seemed to be repelled from it. "Some scribed magic
spell. Resolve wanted me to hold onto it because I can invoke
it; I won't call its power into being, though."

"What kind of spell is it?" she asked aloofly.

"What other kind? A destructive one."

She shut and rolled her eyes. "Come on, Cory," she put her
hand on his shoulder. "Resolve, lead the way!"

There was no path to follow, and apparently no pattern in
the route Resolve took. 'Typical wizard's instincts,' Cory
thought. 'No logic to them at all.'

Only one hour down the non-road, a rustle in the nearby
shrubbery caught their attention. Everyone poised for conflict.
A lone gray figure with a longbow staggered out of the bushes,
obviously disoriented, wearing only a quiver and a row of leaves
over a deep chest slash. He started, suddenly realizing that he
was in the presence of other people; and when his attention came
to Coriolanus, he screamed.

He fumbled with his bow, horrified to realize that there was
no way he could ready an arrow in time. He looked behind for a
place to run, but he could barely turn around without stumbling.
He dropped the bow.

"Oh, no!" Coriolanus realized. "That's the one Outer
Worlder I didn't kill back there." The gray stared up straight
into his eyes. The black eyes didn't seem nearly so alien
anymore.

"Does he want to kill you?" Fhef asked.

"Looks more like he's afraid I'll kill him." He lowered his
shield, sheathed his falchion, and exhaled as relaxedly as he
could make it look.

The gray one cowered back a little, but finally relaxed.
Extending his arms, Resolve came up to him, laid his hands on his
chest, and closed his eyes.

The gray sighed, contentedly, his eyes seeming to grow
sharper and brighter. The rigid scar on his chest was becoming
more alive, less hindering. Resolve opened his eyes and removed
his hands, brushing away the leaves from the chest; the Outer
Worlder wouldn't need them anymore, and they hadn't much
medicinal value anyway. The wound now stood as only a giant
scab.

After exchanging a few mumbles with the gray man, Resolve
rejoined the group. "He says his name's Eferti," he relayed,
making Cory wonder (but only momentarily) how he found that out
before Resolve led them off again toward the known and the
unknown.

Cory and Fhef were at the back of the line, arm-in-arm.
Coriolanus looked over his shoulder at Eferti, smiling, and made
the faintest gesture of, "Come along." Eferti happily retrieved
his bow and fell into line behind the two figures in rigid
leather armor.

"Glad to see you've seen things my way," Fhef said.

Coriolanus responded, "We could use an archer anyway."

Four hours of walking passed, four hours of moving and
resting at wearying intervals, and Resolve stopped cold. "Just
up ahead," he whispered. "Oh, but it's close! If anyone wants to
back out, say so now."

No one moved or made a sound. They knew what was at stake.

Silently, Resolve led them to seeing range.

Seven strides later, Coriolanus could see them past the
trees. The wooded area up ahead wasn't as dense as the woods he
was in, and Rylon's light showed the 30-meter-wide region was
littered with moronic, lifeless looking grey people on patrol.
"Homunculi," Resolve reported. "They're animatons, dead bodies
set into motion through dark magic. All right, you know what to
do — now go!"

Everyone, including Eferti, chose a blank spot in their
cover and dashed through it, shouting various phrases of
confusion. Fair fights weren't Coriolanus' strong point, but at
least he fantasized about them.

Cory looked straight into the face of a grunting one not
three meters away. Fine, he would engage this one first.
Weaving erratically as Greslan had taught him to do, he moved in;
but not fast enough to strike first. The un-dead automaton swung
a good, solid right hook that landed dead center on Cory's
interposed shield.

Cory's right arm recoiled, vibrating. He actually felt that
hard blow through his shield! Okay, so it was strong, though it
didn't look it. He brought his left arm around in a Rylon's-
crescent arch and hacked his falchion down across the thing's
left shoulder. There was no blood.

Shocked by the fact that the beast was still coming,
Coriolanus realized just how much of an advantage not being alive
gave it. He would have to stop the zombie by ruining enough of
its muscles for it to be inoperative.

Another fist swung out, but this time he ducked under it and
struck the enchanted blade across its neck as hard as he could.
The head rose up by half a cee-em, and rolled onto the dust. The
creature finally collapsed.

Breathing heavily, he glanced around for the next most
likely target. Off to one side, he saw Sonna parry a grey fist
and then practically cut his opponent's chest in half with his
battle axe while saying, "Foul Outer World creature, I banish you
to the darkness from which you came!" Yes, Cory thought, he sure
banished it good.

The nearest active zombie had its attention occupied by
Fhef. In one smooth motion, she raised her two-handed high above
her head, shouted, and brought it down to neatly cleave the
animated beast's head in two. At the point her sword was above
her head, her height from tip to boot must have been well over
three meters; it was an impressive sight Cory wouldn't be likely
to copy.

Where were the rest of the beasts? There must have been
more than just three or four. Resolve had just cast some
pyrotechnic spell on one of them, putting enough holes in its
body to take it out of action. Another one was clomping up from
behind; the wizard heard it, turned around, and clapped his hands
in front of his face. The creature kept coming; Cory realized
Resolve was in trouble and started running. Yet they were nearly
twenty meters away, and the beast was practically on top of its
prey right now.

An arrow shot out from behind a tree and stabbed the
animaton in the back. This was enough to draw its attention away
from the wizard and toward the one who'd fired. Coriolanus
looked to the arrow's source, and saw Eferti starting to retreat.
The Outer Worlder had quite probably saved Resolve's life. It
was about time Cory returned the favor. He dashed up to the
beast, maneuvered into a tactical position behind it, and hacked
three solid times across its spine. With its nervous system
severed, the zombie doubled over.

He looked up at Eferti, who was smiling, and raised a
triumphant left fist in the same friend/victory manner Resolve
had done when Cory finished off Eferti's comrade. But this time,
he meant it.

"He surprised me," Resolve apologized, "And I instinctively
shot a pain at him. That would paralyze a living creature, but
these guys aren't affected by pain." He looked off into the
surrounding forest, and caught sight of another homunculus
retreating, probably to regroup. "Can't let them get away," he
mumbled as he chased after it.

So Resolve had made a mistake. Well, after all, he hadn't
gotten much sleep since the whole ordeal started. Cory figured
it would probably never happen again.

Cory spotted another retreating zombie. He had followed it
out of the demi-clearing when Fhef intercepted him. "Wait a
minute, lover," she panted, out of breath from the encounter's
exertion, "What's one of the first tactics they teach you in
warrior training?"

"Uh . . . striking by surprise." It was the one he was most
familiar with, anyway.

"No, before that. Diversion."

Coriolanus was speechless.

"You send soldiers out to be obvious and/or cause lots of
damage, and this takes the enemy's attention away from your real
goal. That's what these zombies are doing; they're not standing
guard, they're diverting us! What else would they be doing
without their creator?"

"But what are they diverting us from? And where?" Cory was
getting nervous.

The wizard was nowhere in sight; the zombie had succeeded in
leading him away. "SONNA!" Cory shouted. The same non-response.
"EFERTI!"

"It's no good," Fhef admitted. "We've got to move, and
we've got to move fast. Their controller probably knows that the
diversion's worked by now, and he'll certainly slip past us if we
go back and get the others."

They stopped short after half a kay-em. Across a ten-meter
expanse of treeless grass, a group of five grey, lifeless
animatons surrounded their animator, who stared right back at
Cory and Fhef. The man in the center was doubtlessly human; in
fact, he was an Inner Worlder right down to his dark magician's robes.

Cory issued Fhef a hand signal to go around the outside of
the group, leaving him to face this problem frontally. "All
right, magic user, chaos provoker, you're not going to break our
civilization down for the second time!"

The necromancer smiled a wily grin and voiced, "Nhhh." His
hands crossed in front of his stomach and spread out, saying the
universal "No, get out of my way."

"Kraaaah!" Coriolanus shouted, and charged in toward him
with his gold-tinted falchion raised high.

The un-dead's master wiggled his fingers and clenched his
fists over his solar plexus. Cory stopped and doubled over, a
wave of black sickness washing over him. He would have vomited
had he eaten anything recently.

The sickness passed momentarily, but now he knew what a
weapon his opponent posessed. Fhef charged at the mob from the
side. "Go get 'em, Fhef!" Cory encouraged her.

A grey set upon her instantly. She ducked the first blow,
then swung her two-handed sword at it. It would have hit, if the
beast hadn't knocked it out of the way with dagger-point
precision.

'Oh, no,' Cory thought, lowering his falchion to his waist.
The two of them were no match for five zombies and a dark
sorcerer, especially when the wizard had this much control over
its zombies' skill.

He fiddled with his falchion, wondering what to do next,
when he felt the rolled-up paper sticking out of his sheath
strap. He gasped, dropped his sword, and took out the scroll and
unrolled it in one motion. The spell sat on the page as it had
before. The magic, destructive spell.

He looked up at Fhef, who looked back at him and brightened
up when she saw the scroll. Didn't she know what she was
proposing? Death! He looked down at his own body. He'd be
adding death to the World with this scribed spell. Magic, death,
magic and death; and a memory of Greslan's convulsed, dead body
rushed back to him. His old mentor had looked so pale, so
frozen. But he hadn't gotten that way without a fight; no,
Cory'd watched the old man blow it. He'd looked on helplessly as
the retributive magic worked itself on his insides until the
agony stopped making him wriggle.

He looked at the parchment in his hands once more. The
symbols were clear as the night; they held the power that was his
— and Fhef's — only chance of victory. He alone had had the
tutelage to read the symbols and channel their energy. But he
would be using magic, for Rylon's sake; he'd be wielding That
Power Which Fuelled Greslan's Death! Fighting chaos with chaos
just didn't work, as he'd figured hundreds of times.

Fhef had taken one of the zombies' punches and was in a
guerilla retreat. She looked back at her lover and shouted,
"Read it, Cory! READ IT!"

There seemed no other choice. The grey-skinned beasts were
advancing on him, their master shouting his final, triumphant
orders in their midst. Coriolanus was shaking like mad; all his
agility, all his skill, even the family falchion and Greslan's
armor were no match for their sheer force of numbers.

He looked down, and with a skill that hadn't been practiced
for over a decade, he read the scrawls from the page.

The instant he uttered the last syllable, electric arcs
began crackling over his left arm. Coriolanus jumped, scared,
but the arm was unhurt. Then, by an urge almost sexually
intense, he flailed his arm so that it faced his adversaries and
tensed it, pulling it back as if from a recoil. The blue-white
static jumped from his arm into the air as a bolt of lightning,
and as soon as it reached the dead-center of the oncoming mob —
hitting the controller square — it flared out into a sphere.

Ball lightning; Rylon's fire, it was called on the rare
occasions when it occurred naturally. Fhef and he watched the
display as the grey humanoid masses fried in the heat of their
skin's own resistance. The aurora was too bright to see exactly
what was happening to the sorcerer in the center, but they didn't
need much imagination.

The flare subsided; all that remained was once-living
charcoal. There was silence, augmented only by the bleats of
full Rylon insects.

Coriolanus walked toward Fhef, she staggered to him, and
they hugged each other. They had done it, they had accomplished
what they had to do, and he knew it.

How long would it be before they returned to their home land
and their home time? It might be in three minutes, it might be
never. At this point, Coriolanus didn't care if he never went
home. Though he hadn't been here for twenty-four hours, he felt
more at peace than he ever had at West Riverfork. Maybe Fhef
being in his arms was the sole reason for that, and maybe not.

He stroked her hair and stared up at Rylon. The giant night
watcher was nearly full; it would be full by the time Resolve and
the rest arrived. A group of homunculi with their creator
destroyed wouldn't be much of a problem for Resolve, or Sonna; or
Eferti, for that matter.

Rylon, long regarded as the mother of the World — to think
its nocturnal face had been beheld by men for only thirty
thousand years! The World even seemed to favor its parent,
locked in a 96-hour orbit with the same side always to Rylon so
that it never moved in the sky.

Perhaps some day, men could leave the World and venture past
Rylon, past Luminos, to the far distant Luminoses across the
black night sea. They had come here in the past, after all, and
some day maybe other men would come. But all this was for the
future and, even with the chance bright magic had given the
World, they wouldn't leave the place they called home for a long,
long time.